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Parables of Grace - Luke 15
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
God will always be there to inspire you toward the infinite absurdity of grace. It doesn't make sense. And that's the point. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here.
Speaker 1:We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome to Commons today. If we haven't met, my name is Jeremy, and we're really glad that you took part of your weekend to worship with us today, particularly as we enter into this season of Lent together. Now if you're new to commons, you may not have seen a clerical stole like this before.
Speaker 1:This is simply part of how we signal our place in the year together. All year, you will see us wear, the liturgical colors when we serve the Eucharist at church. But in the lead up to Christmas at Advent and in our preparation for Easter during Lent, we wear these colors during the sermon to help focus ourselves on what we are building to in the season. So this past Wednesday, we gathered and we marked ourselves with ash as Yelena led us into the season of Lent. And now for the next six weeks, as we prepare and we reflect and we get ourselves ready for resurrection, we are going to be reminding ourselves of what this season is all about.
Speaker 1:And I say that, and I recognize that Lent can have this sort of dour feel to it. You know, we wear purple, and we put ashes on our foreheads, and we think about repentance and death and mortality and giving things up. And all of that can seem a bit at odds if we're supposed to be preparing for the celebration of Easter. But the idea here is really that we have to experience something of mourning. We have to recognize our mortality if we're ever going to properly be overwhelmed by the joy of resurrection and return.
Speaker 1:Resurrection requires death. Now sometimes that's physical death, but sometimes that's the death of a dream or how we thought something was gonna turn out. Sometimes it's a death to self and the leaving of old habits and patterns behind. But Lent is what reminds us that there is beauty to be found in ashes, and that resurrection is often actually about discovering joy hidden in the places where we least expected to find it. And so this Lent, I pray that you mourn and repent and reflect on your own mortality, but that in all of it, might find some very deep joy as well.
Speaker 1:However, that brings us to our new series, the parables of grace. And after our series in Romans, we now turn our attention to the words of Jesus. And this is something we do every year at Commons. Every year, we set aside time alongside a story from the Hebrew scriptures and a letter from the New Testament to ground ourselves directly in the teachings of Jesus. And so this year, as we get ready for Easter, it is the parables of grace that we want to focus on together.
Speaker 1:And Jesus loves to tell these stories. Right? We know that. He does sermonize from time to time. There's the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon by the Sea, but most of Jesus' teaching to us actually comes in the form of story.
Speaker 1:And often his parables are categorized into the parables of grace, judgment, and kingdom. We did a series on the parables of judgment a few years ago. Surprisingly, those are actually some of our most viewed sermons on YouTube. Who knew? People are into that.
Speaker 1:But we have not done the parables of kingdom yet, so that's on the radar for a future series. But this year, through Lent and right through Easter, our focus is on the parables of grace. So today is the lost sheep. Next week is the good Samaritan. After that is the unforgiving servant.
Speaker 1:Then it's the unhelpful friend, seeds, unjust judges, Lazarus and the rich man. And finally, on Easter Sunday, we will return to the prodigal son. So lots of parables to get through. But even as I lift off this category of parables, you may not have actually realized just how many stories Jesus tells throughout his teaching. Now, Clyne Snodgrass, who wrote a fantastic book on the parables, wrote about how central story was to Jesus' pedagogy.
Speaker 1:He says, discourse we tolerate, but story we attend. Story entertains, informs, involves, motivates, authenticates, and mirrors our existence. By creating a narrative world, the author abducts us and almost godlike tells us what really exists in their world. That's kind of the point for Jesus. He lives in this new world.
Speaker 1:His view of the universe is completely unique. His imagination of grace is entirely different from ours. And so by skipping past the teaching and jumping straight to the telling of stories, Jesus is able somehow to disarm a lot of our objections to what he sees when he looks at the world around him. As Tolkien once said, my work is of course fundamentally religious, but saying such things and making them explicit, well, that would risk spoiling those very aspects. And that's something that Jesus really seems to get in a powerful way, which is why I think Jesus remains so fascinating often regardless of our religious convictions.
Speaker 1:He has this way of cutting to the heart of the matter. So let's pray, and then we'll tell some stories. God of grace, who welcomes us into this Lenten journey, who guides us through these sacred seasons, who brings us back to yourself over and over again. Journey with us this Easter. That we might know the long story of promise and fulfillment and salvation for ourselves.
Speaker 1:Through startling visions and difficult wilderness, would you walk with us? And as we return to your stories of grace, these parables that now invite us to imagine and wonder and awaken to your love. Might we allow your goodness to sink somewhere deep inside of us, so that in time it may come that these parables shape the story we choose to live out of in your world. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Okay. So as I mentioned today, we are looking at the parable of the lost sheep. And we need to cover why parables, the retelling of parables, finding ourselves in parables, and finally, allowing ourselves to be surprised by parables. But first, a quick story here. My son has started to adopt the habit of praying before meals.
Speaker 1:And so now, when we eat, he pauses everyone, and he makes everyone hold hands. Not sure where he got that from, but it's cute. And he prays for us. It's really very sweet. And as a pastor, I have tried to resist any impulse to teach him the right way to pray, and instead, just tried to let him find his own voice in prayer.
Speaker 1:But interestingly, he has adopted a bit of a liturgy to his prayers. Goes something like this. Dear God, thank you for this food, and thank you for these people. Amen. So it's kinda short and sweet.
Speaker 1:It works. I like it. Except that last week, it was just he and I for dinner, and so he wanted to pray. So we stopped, we held hands, he prayed. Dear God, thank you for this food and thank you for these people.
Speaker 1:Amen. And so I stopped and I said, so Eaton, who are these people? He said, oh dad, that's just a thing that you say when you pray. And that made me laugh. But this week at dinner, Rachel and I are there.
Speaker 1:We're having dinner. He added a little scope to his prayers. He prays, dear God, thank you for this food and thank you for these people. And then there was a pause and he added, and thank you for our dog and also for all the other people's dogs. Amen.
Speaker 1:Which also made me smile. Now, I tell that story because at a sort of small and kind of hilarious level, what we are watching is our son's imagination of God grow. He's watched us as his parents express some gratitude for our food. He's picked up on a sense of expanding that thankfulness to all people in the room or otherwise. And now it is all dogs roaming the earth that have been welcomed into his imagination of grace.
Speaker 1:And we haven't even got to all dogs go to heaven yet. But that's sort of how faith works. Right? We watch it, and then we emulate it. Someone fosters it, and slowly it becomes us.
Speaker 1:The truth is it's not our theology as much as the stories that surround us that end up shaping us. And Jesus really seems to know this about us. Now one of my favorite writers, Robert Farrar Capon, who we will hear a lot from in this series, once said that we should demand more of our theologians, Discussions of the really important things. Not does God exist, but rather what is God like? Is God nasty or nice?
Speaker 1:Does God wear overpowering aftershave? Does God force leftover food on his friends for lunch? His point being, that sometimes the stories we tell ourselves about God are far more important than the formulations we use to box God in. And that perhaps our greatest need is actually not for the details. It's actually for the proximity.
Speaker 1:My son does not need a better script for his prayers. What he needs is to be near stories that continually expand his imagination of grace. And that's really what Jesus seems to get with his parables. That when you and I come face to face with the divine, it's actually not about having our questions answered. It's about having the stope scope of our stories expanded.
Speaker 1:And hopefully, that's exactly what these stories are gonna do for us this Lent. So let's talk about lost sheep. This is from Luke chapter 15 starting in verse one. Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathered around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, this man welcomes sinners and eats with them.
Speaker 1:So a lot of cultural baggage here in the opening of this story. Sinners and government officials are being lumped in together by the critics here. I know none of us would ever make a mistake like that. But actually, some of these tax collectors probably were corrupt and shady. And certainly, at the very least, they had a reputation at the time.
Speaker 1:But here, they are automatically being characterized based on their category. And we do this all the time. Right? Liberal, conservative, gay, straight, settler, indigenous. We make assumptions about someone, even their openness to God based on the bucket we put them in.
Speaker 1:And of course, what's remarkable about Jesus here is that neither guilt by association or guilt by guilt are really an issue for him. Being thought of as a sinner or actually being a sinner neither seem to give Jesus any pause. And I know we haven't even gotten to the story yet, but this is important here. Because sometimes I think what stops us from moving toward God is what people think about us. And sometimes what stops us is what we think about ourselves.
Speaker 1:Neither are a barrier for Jesus here. And trust me, no matter what story you have been told about yourself, no matter what story you have told your self about yourself, Jesus is always eager to sit with you and eat with you. That's the point of these stories. And actually, I have long thought that religion is always at its best when it is most attractive to the people who are the least comfortable with it. But Jesus tells them a story.
Speaker 1:He says, suppose one of you has a 100 sheep and loses one of them. Doesn't he leave the 99 in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and brings it back home. Then he calls his friends and his neighbors and together and rejoices and says, rejoice with me. I have found my lost sheep.
Speaker 1:I tell you that in the same way, there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who do not need to. This is Luke chapter 15 verses one to seven. So picture the scene here. Jesus is sitting and eating with some undesirables. Some religious leaders sit in the back and snicker and grumble.
Speaker 1:And so Jesus turns to them and tells them a story. Now, stories like this were probably repeated many times by Jesus. For example, the gospel of Thomas, which is not in your bible, but dates back to very early in the Christian story, includes an almost word for word version of the same lost sheep parable. Similarly, Matthew 18, Jesus is talking about the importance of children and he pulls up a little child and he says, the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. And then he goes on to tell this same story of a lost sheep to illustrate that.
Speaker 1:So it's clear that Jesus told this story at least a few times, probably many times, in a variety of different situations. That's part of the beauty of a good story. Right? You just keep telling it. Trust me.
Speaker 1:I promise you, I will be telling stories about Eaton as a five year old until his wedding day and probably long after because they're just good stories. But the thing is, the gospel writers are likely aware of these multiple tellings. And they probably heard the story multiple times in different contexts, and they're making choices now as they write. They're situating the story in the setting that best communicates what they think Jesus is trying to say. So by putting it in a certain context, Luke is hinting to us what he thinks the story is about.
Speaker 1:And by placing it in a slightly different context, Matthew is hinting at what he thinks the story is all about. This is one of the really neat elements of parables that Jesus teaches in a way that leaves room for us. Actually, any good story, we can't help but get drawn in and interpret it. So here, Luke, who's likely a gentile, ties the story to a discussion about religious outcasts. Sinners, tax collectors, and everyone who's excluded on religious terms.
Speaker 1:Matthew, who's probably a Jew, ties this story to a discussion of cultural outcasts, little children, and the unimportant, and everyone who's excluded on social terms. But at the same time, it's the same story about who we leave on the outside and who God welcomes back in. And yet the story is made personal by how each of the gospel writers hears it and receives it and that's beautiful. Because part of what that means is that however you hear the story today and whoever it opens your heart up to, that's exactly who it was meant to. The last, the lost, the least, the little, whoever that looks like in your world, that's who this story is about.
Speaker 1:Now, I love that, but let's look at the actual story here. One of the things I think is really important when we read a parable is that we ask ourselves which character or maybe which characters we identify with. And immediately for me, that's the lost sheep. Right? I'm lost.
Speaker 1:God finds me. That's my immediate connection to the story. And there's probably a few reasons for that. First of all, we have this language in Christianity about being sheep. We are the sheep of God's pasture.
Speaker 1:I just wanna be a sheep. Baa ba ba ba. I kind of vaguely remember that song from somewhere in my childhood. But it's funny because in any other context, being called a sheep would be considered an insult. Right?
Speaker 1:You can imagine some militant atheist person speaking to a Christian and with as much disdain as he can muster, lashing out and saying, you're just a sheep. And you respond, oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I wanted to be humble and I didn't want to say it about myself, but I'm so glad that you noticed miscommunication. Popular conception though is that a sheep has no mind of its own.
Speaker 1:It does, what it's told. It follows the leader except that in this story, the sheep that is the star of the show is the one sheep that I generally assume I'm supposed to see myself in, and it's the sheep that doesn't act like sheep. This is the defective sheep or the rebel sheep, or the sheep with a leather jacket and a cigarette and an ewe on his arm. Female sheep are called ewes. That's a farmer joke for the record, and it's all I got.
Speaker 1:But I find it interesting that immediately I tend to identify with the character in the story who's not doing what the character is supposed to be doing. There are lots of these complex situations in life where I get lost, and I struggle to know what to do. And career choices and relationship decisions and that complex dance of grace and truth that allows us to truly love someone well. But then there are all of those situations where I know exactly what to do, and I still find myself going the other way. Right?
Speaker 1:The moments where I know I'm being selfish, and I know it's just because I'm insecure, and I know I'm gonna do it anyway. Or the moments where I know who I am, and I know who I want to be, I know that I'm loved, and still I find myself acting out of shame instead of courage. And so I think it's worth reflecting, for me at least, that my first instinct is to see myself in the character that's not true to itself. Do I have changes to make? Have I wandered somewhere I didn't want to go?
Speaker 1:Have I become confused about who I am? But then again, maybe it's the question this, do I actually need to remind myself that I'm on track? And I'm not lost and God does have me and I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be right now. Sheep get lost and so do I and so do you, but there are also 99 sheep in the story that are safe at home with the shepherd. So if you're lost, then know that God is looking for you.
Speaker 1:But if you're where you need to be, then learn to feel safe in that too. But that's the sheep. What about the shepherd? I have a job as a pastor that is very often compared to being a shepherd. Though let me be clear, I know nothing of hard work or animal husbandry.
Speaker 1:These hands are delicately preserved for reading large books and typing long sermons. But I generally don't see myself in the character of the shepherd in this story. And that's probably because that character is obviously the stand in for God. Right? I don't do any seeking.
Speaker 1:I don't do any saving. That's God's job. I leave it to God. Now, of course, we're a church. So we tell the story of Jesus.
Speaker 1:That's kind of our thing. Every single week, we gather and we close with the same benediction. Love God. Love people. Tell the story.
Speaker 1:So we rehearse the story. We tell the story. We even participate in the story, but we are not the story. That's important to me because nobody finds God here. This is simply one of a million places where God finds us.
Speaker 1:And as I see it, churches and concerts and boardrooms and public libraries are where God tracks us down. At our best, maybe we just help you become aware of the divine who's been looking for you for ages. And that's why no matter how you are on your faith journey or how long you've come to Commons, I hope you never get a sense of anyone here pushing you faster than you need to go. Faith takes time. I get it.
Speaker 1:And that's okay because God's not going anywhere. Except, here's the thing. If you read Jesus' words, he actually starts the story this way. Suppose one of you has a 100 sheep and loses one of them. So we're not God, but maybe here Jesus is asking us to imagine we were.
Speaker 1:So let's try it on. Suppose you have a 100 sheep and one goes missing, would you not leave the rest to find the one? And I think if we're honest here, I mean, we'd have to say no, wouldn't we? Again, I have no experience caring for sheep. But let's be frank, this does not sound like a good value proposition.
Speaker 1:Remember, Jesus is primarily addressing the teachers of the law, those who wanna exclude certain people, and it's almost like he's giving them a reason to do it. I mean, he goes out of his way to explain you don't have a pen to put them in. You got no hired hand to keep them safe. You just leave them there out in the open field to go off chasing after one stray sheep. Wouldn't you do that?
Speaker 1:This is like bad shepherding one zero one. This guy's gonna be out of business next week. If you step back and you take it at face value, it's almost like Jesus is giving his critics every opportunity to justify all of their bad choices. This shepherd is foolish. And yet Jesus says, this is what God is like.
Speaker 1:This is part of what's buried so beautifully in the parable. Jesus is not trying to make grace sensible. Jesus is trying to say that God is not like us. I mean, whether it's the little children at Jesus' feet in Matthew's imagination of the story or whether it's the outcasts at the table in Luke's version, this is a parable about the aspirational absurdity of grace. The grace points you in directions you would never otherwise go.
Speaker 1:Maybe it can help to think of it this way. We have all discarded someone at some point in our journey. Right? Maybe they wandered away from us and we let them go. Or maybe they made a mistake and so we moved on with our lives.
Speaker 1:They went right, we turned left, we never looked back. Every one of us has been on the other side of that equation at some point in our journey. You know, we were abandoned or we felt ignored or we got lost somewhere along the line and no one came looking for us. And what happened is we justified all of that. We rationalized it.
Speaker 1:We made economic sense of it. We said to ourselves, well, really, that's the only way. I mean, you can't leave 99 out in the open field all alone and go search for one. It doesn't make sense. Yet somewhere, all of us wished it was different, didn't we?
Speaker 1:We wished that we hadn't let that relationship walk away even though we knew there was nothing we could have done to save it. Or we wished that someone had come looking for us even though we knew we weren't ready to come home yet. We wished that love was less than rational. Because here's the thing, every single one of us aspires toward grace somewhere inside of us. But it's foolish.
Speaker 1:And that's the point of the story. We all know we can't live life with people who are different than us. We all know we can't take children seriously. We all know we can't really just love people without some expectation about how they'll behave. And yet Jesus looks square in the face and tells us a story that makes us wish we could.
Speaker 1:Suppose you had a 100 sheep. Suppose one of them got lost. And suppose you were the kind of person that would drop everything to track them down at any expense no matter what. Suppose you were like God. Wouldn't that be incredible?
Speaker 1:For Cape On, writing about this parable says, Jesus implies, it seems to me, that even if all 100 sheep could somehow get lost, it would not be a problem for this bizarrely good shepherd. Because he is first and foremost in the business of finding the lost, not corralling the strayed. Give him a world with a 100 out of every 100 sheep lost. Give God, in other words, the world full of losers that is the only real world there is, and it will do just fine. For lostness, you see, is exactly his cup of tea.
Speaker 1:See, that's what Jesus is tapping into here. It's the absurd image of the divine that still resides somewhere in each of us, gently calling us to love in ways that don't make sense to us yet. See, this parable is not about our world slightly modified. This is a fairy tale in the best possible sense. One that invites us to imagine who we would be in a new world completely transformed by grace.
Speaker 1:And so we revisit our place in the story once more. Am I the lost sheep? Are there areas in my life where I know I'm off course and somehow I wandered where I didn't intend to go and I need to be found? And I'm wishing that someone would come looking for me even if I'm not quite ready to go home yet. Am I one of the 99?
Speaker 1:And I'm safe at home, but I remember relationships that I let go of too quickly. And even though I know there was nothing I could have done to salvage it on my own, maybe I could have stayed closer for longer. And it wouldn't have made sense, but maybe it would have been good. Have I fundamentally misunderstood the shepherd? And what I imagined was the stern face of recrimination, this God who waits for me to return with my tail between my legs begging for forgiveness.
Speaker 1:But all of a sudden, when Jesus invites me to put myself in the role of the shepherd, what I realize is that I've always put myself there. And when I let God be God, and I let God take God's place, everything changes because now I encounter the shepherd that Jesus knows. This God who tracks us down and invites us home. This God who replaces what is sensible with what is graceful. This God who welcomes us to eat and drink and laugh and smile and joke at the infinite absurdity of divine love.
Speaker 1:Love that has already left the 99 behind in the open field to come and find every single one of us. Whoever you are in this story today, know that love is looking for you. And that even when you try to make sense of the divine, God will always be there to inspire you toward the absurdity of grace. Let's pray. God, as we begin this Lenten season, we engage in practices of generosity and repentance of giving up and confessing.
Speaker 1:Would all of those point us back to your grace? The grace that sits at the center of the universe, the grace that sits at the center of the story of Easter, Grace that sits at the center of all of these stories that you tell. That remind us that your love does not make sense. It's not rational, and that's the point. That we are being offered an image into a new world defined by completely new economics.
Speaker 1:God, as we understand your love that leaves 99, that comes to search us down, that looks for us today and tomorrow and no matter how many times we get lost. Would that absurd story then become the story that we live out in all of our relationships? Might we become the grace and peace you extend to the world, and might we do it through your divine heart. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.